If you are like me, yours are probably your email, social media, a news site, any sites you may need for work, and any shopping sites you visit.

Below are two of my favorite bookmarked sites that you might find useful in 2017.

Swagbucks

I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t do some sort of shopping online, these days, myself included. Amazon is my BFF and I order from other websites when I can’t find what I want at Amazon. Sometimes, I think I could totally channel my inner Sandra Bullock, from The Net (an old movie that I would DEFINITELY recommend), and never leave the house and do everything online. However, if I can get something for my shopping efforts, other than the thing I am purchasing, I’m on board. So…enter Swagbucks. Swagbucks is a website where you log in there before doing your online shopping.

Then, you search for the online store you need and they will let you know if that is a store that they partner with and how many Swagbucks per dollar you can earn there.

Then, simply press “Shop Now” and it will take you to the site through their site and when you make your purchase, Swagbucks will add it to your “Shop and Earn” section and after 30 days, you will get Swagbucks for it, which you can cash in for gift cards or other goods in their “Reward Store.”

There are other ways to earn SwagBucks, like taking surveys or watching videos, but quite frankly, I don’t have time for that, so I just stick with shopping through the website. I’ve earned many a gift card through shopping with Swagbucks, which, as I’ve said, is always helpful.

About 16 and 1/2 years ago, when I discovered I was pregnant with Monkey Girl, Real Man and I realized that I was about to be out of work for 9 months on maternity leave and that was going to cut our income in half. We were newlyweds (okay, married three years, but still babies) and living in our first home. Half a salary wasn’t going to cut it.

So, I started reading everything I could get my hands on about living frugally.

I devoured The Tightwad Gazette. I read all three volumes of the book and started doing everything I could to save. I had articles published in couponing and frugal living magazines, and scoured the internet (which was still fairly new) for anything I could find on frugality.

In my searching, I stumbled across a message board that was in it’s infancy…The Frugal Village. And I quickly began spending the majority of my time after work waiting for Real Man to get home from his job (he worked the late shift in those days) reading posts, joining challenges, and leading my own threads. The Frugal Village became a lifeline for me, and I became a moderator for the site and made many friends, some of whom I stay in contact with today.

Over the past 15 years, I have visited the site, on and off, always going back when I felt that I needed a kick in the frugal pants and some inspiration. However, a few years ago, the site owner, Sara, sold the site, and it didn’t quite feel the same. So, you can imagine my joy when Sara and I were talking, one day, and she told me that she had a new site, in it’s infancy, and invited me to come and check it out.

So, I invite you to come and check it out. Maybe you don’t need to. That’s okay. but, maybe you do. And if that is the case, I’d love for you to come and support Sara and see what it’s all about. As I said, it is still pretty new and there are only a few of us there, but the more the merrier.